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I get distracted when I get home from work. I’m easily amused and have the "Ooooooooooooooooohhh Shiny" mentality type of distraction. I don’t deny it. I don’t exactly revel in it either. By the time I actually get around to doing some of the things I need to get done, it’s late, I’m tired and cranky. If I put things off until the weekend we end up doing stuff and getting involved ("Is that a shiny over there?") and so things once again get overlooked. I’m not sure I would actually sleep if I didn’t know for a certainty that it helps save my job and my marriage. So what can I do about it?
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Things I have tried with little or no success:
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Wall Calendars
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Sticky Notes
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Todo Tasks in Outlook
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Todo Tasks on Google
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GTD sites
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Web Calendars
Nothing so far seems to work for me — I’m mundane blind. When there is a shiny I don’t even notice the mundane.
Like many geeks, corporate types, etc. I live and die by e-mail. This is something I greatly increased in focus when I was a consultant. Now I can handle literally hundreds of e-mails a day, and I can’t stand a cluttered mailbox. I normally use Gmail's interface just through a browser, but I’ve been known to dabble in POP3 and IMAP access (the insanity!!). Mostly though I just use the web browser. It’s the same at work, at home, and on the go. The one thing I hate most about my mailbox is when it gets full. I hate a cluttered inbox, I hate coming back and seeing more than one page of e-mail waiting for me (which does happen if there is some strange reason I don’t check my email for two days).
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So I stumbled upon the idea of combining these two things, hatred of e-mail clutter and a need to get motivated and GTD, so now I’m emailing my tasks to myself (and now Xie has joined into the game). The first thing when I went down this road is to send myself a daily list of tasks to do, well I tried that once in the past and that doesn’t seem to help. Neither do reminder services, since I easily dismiss them.
The format I use when I mail myself is TODO (task) — this forces me to stare at it every time I look at my e-mail. I’m hoping it will successfully burn the task into my brain. When I actually complete the task it gets archived, thereby saving me space in my inbox. Too many tasks and it will roll over to a second page, I would be highly annoyed if that happened. So essentially I’m going to be GTD by annoying myself.
Meh.
But it may work. Simple Share Buttons Adder (8.4.5) simplesharebuttons.com